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How to Configure Parameter Interceptors ?

- by jyo

Hi In my Struts2 applicaion I have a Jsp page with some feilds , like this <s:form action="customer.action" method="post" validate="false"> <s:textfield name="cust.fname" key="fname" size="20" /> <s:textfield name="cust.lname" key="lname" size="20" /> <s:textfield name="cust.title" key="title" size="20" /> <s:submit method="addCustomer" key="label.submit" align="center" /> </s:form> I have created a Bean Class For that public class Customer { private String fname; private String lname; private String title; public String getFname() { return fname; } public void setFname(String fname) { this.fname = fname; } public String getLname() { return lname; } public void setLname(String lname) { this.lname = lname; } public String getAddress() { return address; } public void setAddress(String address) { this.address = address; } } an Action Class public class CustomerAction extends ActionSupport { private Customer cust; public Customer getCust() { return cust; } public void setCust(Customer cust) { this.cust = cust; } public String addCustomer() { return "success"; } } When i hit the submit button i m getting exception like this com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor setParameters SEVERE: ParametersInterceptor - [setParameters]: Unexpected Exception catched: Error setting expression 'cust.address' with value '[Ljava.lang.String;@153113d' SEVERE: ParametersInterceptor - [setParameters]: Unexpected Exception catched: Error setting expression 'cust.fname' with value '[Ljava.lang.String;@18c8aea' 17 Jun, 2010 3:37:36 PM com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor setParameters SEVERE: ParametersInterceptor - [setParameters]: Unexpected Exception catched: Error setting expression 'cust.lname' with value '[Ljava.lang.String;@1f42731' 17 Jun, 2010 3:37:36 PM com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor setParameters WARNING: Caught an exception while evaluating expression 'cust.lname' against value stack Caught an Ognl exception while getting property cust - Class: ognl.OgnlRuntime File: OgnlRuntime.java Method: getMethodValue Line: 935 - ognl/OgnlRuntime.java:935:-1 at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.CompoundRootAccessor.getProperty(CompoundRootAccessor.java:106) at ognl.OgnlRuntime.getProperty(OgnlRuntime.java:1643) at ognl.ASTProperty.getValueBody(ASTProperty.java:92) at ognl.SimpleNode.evaluateGetValueBody(SimpleNode.java:170) at ognl.SimpleNode.getValue(SimpleNode.java:210) at ognl.ASTChain.getValueBody(ASTChain.java:109) at ognl.SimpleNode.evaluateGetValueBody(SimpleNode.java:170) at ognl.SimpleNode.getValue(SimpleNode.java:210) at ognl.Ognl.getValue(Ognl.java:333) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.OgnlUtil.getValue(OgnlUtil.java:194) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.OgnlValueStack.findValue(OgnlValueStack.java:238) at org.apache.struts2.components.Property.start(Property.java:136) at org.apache.struts2.views.jsp.ComponentTagSupport.doStartTag(ComponentTagSupport.java:54) at org.apache.jsp.pages.SuccessCustomer_jsp._jspx_meth_s_005fproperty_005f1(SuccessCustomer_jsp.java:139) at org.apache.jsp.pages.SuccessCustomer_jsp._jspService(SuccessCustomer_jsp.java:72) at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:70) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:377) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(JspServlet.java:313) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:260) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:646) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:436) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doForward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:374) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.forward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:302) at org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ServletDispatcherResult.doExecute(ServletDispatcherResult.java:139) at org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.StrutsResultSupport.execute(StrutsResultSupport.java:178) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.executeResult(DefaultActionInvocation.java:343) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:248) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.DefaultWorkflowInterceptor.doIntercept(DefaultWorkflowInterceptor.java:213) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.MethodFilterInterceptor.intercept(MethodFilterInterceptor.java:86) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.validator.ValidationInterceptor.doIntercept(ValidationInterceptor.java:150) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.validation.AnnotationValidationInterceptor.doIntercept(AnnotationValidationInterceptor.java:48) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.MethodFilterInterceptor.intercept(MethodFilterInterceptor.java:86) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ConversionErrorInterceptor.intercept(ConversionErrorInterceptor.java:123) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor.intercept(ParametersInterceptor.java:161) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.StaticParametersInterceptor.intercept(StaticParametersInterceptor.java:105) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.CheckboxInterceptor.intercept(CheckboxInterceptor.java:83) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.FileUploadInterceptor.intercept(FileUploadInterceptor.java:207) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ModelDrivenInterceptor.intercept(ModelDrivenInterceptor.java:74) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ScopedModelDrivenInterceptor.intercept(ScopedModelDrivenInterceptor.java:127) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.ProfilingActivationInterceptor.intercept(ProfilingActivationInterceptor.java:107) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.debugging.DebuggingInterceptor.intercept(DebuggingInterceptor.java:206) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ChainingInterceptor.intercept(ChainingInterceptor.java:115) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.I18nInterceptor.intercept(I18nInterceptor.java:143) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.PrepareInterceptor.intercept(PrepareInterceptor.java:115) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.ServletConfigInterceptor.intercept(ServletConfigInterceptor.java:170) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.AliasInterceptor.intercept(AliasInterceptor.java:123) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ExceptionMappingInterceptor.intercept(ExceptionMappingInterceptor.java:176) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor.intercept(ParametersInterceptor.java:161) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.interceptor.CheckboxInterceptor.intercept(CheckboxInterceptor.java:83) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:219) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation$2.doProfiling(DefaultActionInvocation.java:218) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.profiling.UtilTimerStack.profile(UtilTimerStack.java:455) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:216) at org.apache.struts2.impl.StrutsActionProxy.execute(StrutsActionProxy.java:50) at org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.Dispatcher.serviceAction(Dispatcher.java:507) at org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher.doFilter(FilterDispatcher.java:421) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:235) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:233) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:191) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:127) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:102) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:298) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:852) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.process(Http11Protocol.java:588) at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$Worker.run(JIoEndpoint.java:489) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:636) Caused by: ognl.OgnlException: cust [java.lang.NullPointerException] at ognl.OgnlRuntime.getMethodValue(OgnlRuntime.java:935) at ognl.ObjectPropertyAccessor.getPossibleProperty(ObjectPropertyAccessor.java:53) at ognl.ObjectPropertyAccessor.getProperty(ObjectPropertyAccessor.java:121) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.OgnlValueStack$ObjectAccessor.getProperty(OgnlValueStack.java:58) at ognl.OgnlRuntime.getProperty(OgnlRuntime.java:1643) at com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.CompoundRootAccessor.getProperty(CompoundRootAccessor.java:101) ... 143 more 17 Jun, 2010 3:48:55 PM com.opensymphony.xwork2.util.OgnlValueStack logLookupFailure WARNING: NOTE: Previous warning message was issued due to devMode set to true. How do i resolve this ? Thnks

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Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

- by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments. In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE. In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts. First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources. There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves. Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters. Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards. After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server. It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis. It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules. The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client. Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL. The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server. Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users. The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources. For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01 Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01 Billed Qty (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1 WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2, sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from Product T879 /* A05 Product */ , Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ , FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2 Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX. However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory. Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests. This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher. The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result. The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request. When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries. That's the left to right flow in the diagram below. When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases. Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing. This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole. It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary. For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well. This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies. It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next. The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time. This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases. It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model. This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions. For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries. Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM. The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source. In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape. If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape. If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release. This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer. For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics. This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation. It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users. Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database. The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer. When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used. These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources. These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model. Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns. For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively. (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM. In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.) Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users. Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security. The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users. Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience. Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables. The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer. In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers. These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors). There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis. Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software. The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept. When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail. We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model. Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

- by Roger Hart

Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want. Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6

- by ShawnBailey

What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections. In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. RDA (Remote Diagnostic Agent) RDA is a standalone tool that is used to collect both static configuration and dynamic runtime information from the SOA environment. RDA is generally run manually from the command line against a domain or single server. When opening a new Service Request, including an RDA collection can dramatically decrease the back and forth required to collect logs and configuration information for Support. After installing RDA you configure it to use the SOA Suite module as decribed in the referenced resources. The SOA module includes the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) module by default in order to include all of the relevant information for the environment. In addition to this basic configuration there is also an advanced mode where you can set the number of thread dumps for the collections, log files, Incidents, etc. When would you use it? When creating a Service Request or otherwise working with Oracle resources on an issue, capturing environment snapshots to baseline your configuration or to diagnose an issue on your own. How is it related to the other tools? RDA is related to DFW in that it collects the last 10 Incidents from the server by default. In a similar manner, RDA is related to ODL through its collection of the diagnostic logs and these may contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Examples of what it currently collects: (for details please see the links in the Resources section) Diagnostic Logs (ODL) Diagnostic Framework Incidents (DFW) SOA MDS Deployment Descriptors SOA Repository Summary Statistics Thread Dumps Complete Domain Configuration RDA Resources: Webcast Recording: Using RDA with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Blog Post: Diagnose SOA Suite 11g Issues Using RDA Download RDA How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite 11g Products [ID 1350313.1] How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite and BPEL Process Manager 11g [ID 1352181.1] Getting Started With Remote Diagnostic Agent: Case Study - Oracle WebLogic Server (Video) [ID 1262157.1] top DFW (Diagnostic Framework) DFW provides the ability to collect specific information for a particular problem when that problem occurs. DFW is included with your SOA Suite installation and deployed to the domain. Let's define the components of DFW. Diagnostic Dumps: Specific diagnostic collections that are defined at either the 'system' or product level. Examples would be diagnostic logs or thread dumps. Incident: A collection of Diagnostic Dumps associated with a particular problem Log Conditions: An Oracle Diagnostic Logging event that DFW is configured to listen for. If the event is identified then an Incident will be created. WLDF Watch: The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework or 'WLDF' is not a component of DFW, however, it can be a source of DFW Incident creation through the use of a 'Watch'. WLDF Notification: A Notification is a component of WLDF and is the link between the Watch and DFW. You can configure multiple Notification types in WLDF and associate them with your Watches. 'FMWDFW-notification' is available to you out of the box to allow for DFW notification of Watch execution. Rule: Defines a WLDF Watch or Log Condition for which we want to associate a set of Diagnostic Dumps. When triggered the specified dumps will be collected and added to the Incident Rule Action: Defines the specific Diagnostic Dumps to collect for a particular rule ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository; Defined for every server in a domain. This is where Incidents are stored Now let's walk through a simple flow: Oracle Web Services error message OWS-04086 (SOAP Fault) is generated on managed server 1 DFW Log Condition for OWS-04086 evaluates to TRUE DFW creates a new Incident in the ADR for managed server 1 DFW executes the specified Diagnostic Dumps and adds the output to the Incident In this case we'll grab the diagnostic log and thread dump. We might also want to collect the WSDL binding information and SOA audit trail When would you use it? When you want to automatically collect Diagnostic Dumps at a particular time using a trigger or when you want to manually collect the information. In either case it can be readily uploaded to Oracle Support through the Service Request. How is it related to the other tools? DFW generates Incidents which are collections of Diagnostic Dumps. One of the system level Diagonstic Dumps collects the current server diagnostic log which is generated by ODL and can contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Incidents are included in RDA collections by default and ADRCI is a tool that is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support. In addition, both ODL and DMS can be used to trigger Incident creation through DFW. The conditions and rules for generating Incidents can become quite complicated and the below resources go into more detail. A simpler approach to leveraging at least the Diagnostic Dumps is through WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) where there are commands to do the following: Create an Incident Execute a single Diagnostic Dump Describe a Diagnostic Dump List the available Diagnostic Dumps The WLST option offers greater control in what is generated and when. It can be a great help when collecting information for Support. There are overlaps with RDA, however, DFW is geared towards collecting specific runtime information when an issue occurs while existing Incidents are collected by RDA. There are 3 WLDF Watches configured by default in a SOA Suite 11g domain: Stuck Threads, Unchecked Exception and Deadlock. These Watches are enabled by default and will generate Incidents in ADR. They are configured to reset automatically after 30 seconds so they have the potential to create multiple Incidents if these conditions are consistent. The Incidents generated by these Watches will only contain System level Diagnostic Dumps. These same System level Diagnostic Dumps will be included in any application scoped Incident as well. Starting in 11.1.1.6, SOA Suite is including its own set of application scoped Diagnostic Dumps that can be executed from WLST or through a WLDF Watch or Log Condition. These Diagnostic Dumps can be added to an Incident such as in the earlier example using the error code OWS-04086. soa.config: MDS configuration files and deployed-composites.xml soa.composite: All artifacts related to the deployed composite soa.wsdl: Summary of endpoints configured for the composite soa.edn: EDN configuration summary if applicable soa.db: Summary DB information for the SOA repository soa.env: Coherence cluster configuration summary soa.composite.trail: Partial audit trail information for the running composite The current release of RDA has the option to collect the soa.wsdl and soa.composite Diagnostic Dumps. More Diagnostic Dumps for SOA Suite products are planned for future releases along with enhancements to DFW itself. DFW Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Sessions: Diagnostic Framework Diagnostic Framework Documentation DFW WLST Command Reference Documentation for SOA Diagnostic Dumps in 11.1.1.6 top Selective Tracing Selective Tracing is a facility available starting in version 11.1.1.4 that allows you to increase the logging level for specific loggers and for a specific context. What this means is that you have greater capability to collect needed diagnostic log information in a production environment with reduced overhead. For example, a Selective Tracing session can be executed that only increases the log level for one composite, only one logger, limited to one server in the cluster and for a preset period of time. In an environment where dozens of composites are deployed this can dramatically reduce the volume and overhead of the logging without sacrificing relevance. Selective Tracing can be administered either from Enterprise Manager or through WLST. WLST provides a bit more flexibility in terms of exactly where the tracing is run. When would you use it? When there is an issue in production or another environment that lends itself to filtering by an available context criteria and increasing the log level globally results in too much overhead or irrelevant information. The information is written to the server diagnostic log and is exportable from Enterprise Manager How is it related to the other tools? Selective Tracing output is written to the server diagnostic log. This log can be collected by a system level Diagnostic Dump using DFW or through a default RDA collection. Selective Tracing also heavily leverages ODL fields to determine what to trace and to tag information that is part of a particular tracing session. Available Context Criteria: Application Name Client Address Client Host Composite Name User Name Web Service Name Web Service Port Selective Tracing Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Session: Using Selective Tracing to Diagnose SOA Suite Issues How to Use Selective Tracing for SOA [ID 1367174.1] Selective Tracing WLST Reference top DMS (Dynamic Monitoring Service) DMS exposes runtime information for monitoring. This information can be monitored in two ways: Through the DMS servlet As exposed MBeans The servlet is deployed by default and can be accessed through http://<host>:<port>/dms/Spy (use administrative credentials to access). The landing page of the servlet shows identical columns of what are known as Noun Types. If you select a Noun Type you will see a table in the right frame that shows the attributes (Sensors) for the Noun Type and the available instances. SOA Suite has several exposed Noun Types that are available for viewing through the Spy servlet. Screenshots of the Spy servlet are available in the Knowledge Base article How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS). Every Noun instance in the runtime is exposed as an MBean instance. As such they are generally available through an MBean browser and available for monitoring through WLDF. You can configure a WLDF Watch to monitor a particular attribute and fire a notification when the threshold is exceeded. A WLDF Watch can use the out of the box DFW notification type to notify DFW to create an Incident. When would you use it? When you want to monitor a metric or set of metrics either manually or through an automated system. When you want to trigger a WLDF Watch based on a metric exposed through DMS. How is it related to the other tools? DMS metrics can be monitored with WLDF Watches which can in turn notify DFW to create an Incident. DMS Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How to Reset a SOA 11g DMS Metric DMS Documentation top ODL (Oracle Diagnostic Logging) ODL is the primary facility for most Fusion Middleware applications to log what they are doing. Whenever you change a logging level through Enterprise Manager it is ultimately exposed through ODL and written to the server diagnostic log. A notable exception to this is WebLogic Server which uses its own log format / file. ODL logs entries in a consistent, structured way using predefined fields and name/value pairs. Here's an example of a SOA Suite entry: [2012-04-25T12:49:28.083-06:00] [AdminServer] [ERROR] [] [oracle.soa.bpel.engine] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: ] [ecid: 0963fdde7e77631c:-31a6431d:136eaa46cda:-8000-00000000000000b4,0] [errid: 41] [WEBSERVICE_PORT.name: BPELProcess2_pt] [APP: soa-infra] [composite_name: TestProject2] [J2EE_MODULE.name: fabric] [WEBSERVICE.name: bpelprocess1_client_ep] [J2EE_APP.name: soa-infra] Error occured while handling a post operation[[ When would you use it? You'll use ODL almost every time you want to identify and diagnose a problem in the environment. The entries are written to the server diagnostic log. How is it related to the other tools? The server diagnostic logs are collected by DFW and RDA. Selective Tracing writes its information to the diagnostic log as well. Additionally, DFW log conditions are triggered by ODL log events. ODL Resources: ODL Documentation top ADR (Automatic Diagnostics Repository) ADR is not a tool in and of itself but is where DFW stores the Incidents it creates. Every server in the domain has an ADR location which can be found under <SERVER_HOME>/adr. This is referred to the as the ADR 'Base' location. ADR also has what are known as 'Home' locations. Example: You have a domain called 'myDomain' and an associated managed server called 'myServer'. Your admin server is called 'AdminServer'. Your domain home directory is called 'myDomain' and it contains a 'servers' directory. The 'servers' directory contains a directory for the managed server called 'myServer' and here is where you'll find the 'adr' directory which is the ADR 'Base' location for myServer. To get to the ADR 'Home' locations we drill through a few levels: diag/ofm/myDomain/ In an 11.1.1.6 SOA Suite domain you will see 2 directories here, 'myServer' and 'soa-infra'. These are the ADR 'Home' locations. 'myServer' is the 'system' ADR home and contains system level Incidents. 'soa-infra' is the name that SOA Suite used to register with DFW and this ADR home contains SOA Suite related Incidents Each ADR home location contains a series of directories, one of which is called 'incident'. This is where your Incidents are stored. When would you use it? It's a good idea to check on these locations from time to time to see whether a lot of Incidents are being generated. They can be cleaned out by deleting the Incident directories or through the ADRCI tool. If you know that an Incident is of particular interest for an issue you're working with Oracle you can simply zip it up and provide it. How does it relate to the other tools? ADR is obviously very important for DFW since it's where the Incidents are stored. Incidents contain Diagnostic Dumps that may relate to diagnostic logs (ODL) and DMS metrics. The most recent 10 Incident directories are collected by RDA by default and ADRCI relies on the ADR locations to help manage the contents. top ADRCI (Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter) ADRCI is a command line tool for packaging and managing Incidents. When would you use it? When purging Incidents from an ADR Home location or when you want to package an Incident along with an offline RDA collection for upload to Oracle Support. How does it relate to the other tools? ADRCI contains a tool called the Incident Packaging System or IPS. This is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support through a Service Request. Starting in 11.1.1.6 IPS will attempt to collect an offline RDA collection and include it with the Incident package. This will only work if Perl is available on the path, otherwise it will give a warning and package only the Incident files. ADRCI Resources: How to Use the Incident Packaging System (IPS) in SOA 11g [ID 1381259.1] ADRCI Documentation top WLDF (WebLogic Diagnostic Framework) WLDF is functionality available in WebLogic Server since version 9. Starting with FMw 11g a link has been added between WLDF and the pre-existing DFW, the WLDF Watch Notification. Let's take a closer look at the flow: There is a need to monitor the performance of your SOA Suite message processing A WLDF Watch is created in the WLS console that will trigger if the average message processing time exceeds 2 seconds. This metric is monitored through a DMS MBean instance. The out of the box DFW Notification (the Notification is called FMWDFW-notification) is added to the Watch. Under the covers this notification is of type JMX. The Watch is triggered when the threshold is exceeded and fires the Notification. DFW has a listener that picks up the Notification and evaluates it according to its rules, etc When it comes to automatic Incident creation, WLDF is a key component with capabilities that will grow over time. When would you use it? When you want to monitor the WLS server log or an MBean metric for some condition and fire a notification when the Watch is triggered. How does it relate to the other tools? WLDF is used to automatically trigger Incident creation through DFW using the DFW Notification. WLDF Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How To Script the Creation of a SOA WLDF Watch in 11g [ID 1377986.1] WLDF Documentation top

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Promote document data to meta-data

- by antony.trupe

Is there a way to "promote" information in a document(Word, Visio, etc) to "meta-data" that can be auto-magically represented in a SharePoint list? I want to be able to create metrics on information in documents without duplicating the data in the document in a column of the list.

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What do I need to enable to run sar -d?

- by Ryan Olson

When I run sar -d I receive the error message: Requested activities not available in file /var/log/sysstat/sa24 The file does exist, and I can run sar with other flags, but can't see these particular metrics. Is there something I need to enable in sysstat to collect what I need to see this report? Server is Ubuntu 9.04.

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x86 Router Benchmarks?

- by Kevin

I have grow to prefer x86 based router OS's like Vyatta and pfSense over their competitors Cisco and Juniper (Well, I never really used Juniper, but still.). However, they feel "fake" to me, like "Frankenstein" routers. I think my greatest worry is that I am missing out on something by not using the main contenders. Are there any benchmarks out there that compare the main metrics (throuput, etc.) of x86 router operating systems to their proprietary counterparts?

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Google Rules for Retail

- by David Dorf

In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts. These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future. While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth. So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success. The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers. It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent. Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other. Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear. Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day. Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce. The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

- by Michael Snow

12.00 Print 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Since we have a number of new members of the WebCenter Evangelist team - I thought it would be appropriate to close the week with the newest hire and leader of the global WebCenter Evangelists, Christian Finn, who has just joined the Red team after many years with the small technology company up in Redmond, WA. He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

- by kellsey.ruppel

Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today. With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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The Winds of Change are a Blowin’

- by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now. Not the fan part, but the paying customer part. I’m still a huge fan. I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often). I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books. I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do. But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team. I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools. Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more. (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it. Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools. They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum). I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video). I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime. Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited. I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up. So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool. This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with. When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to. The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route. Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford: Team Foundation Server. And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now. So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools. I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny). Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction. As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching. So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant. It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry). As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company. This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with. We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now. This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time. We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

- by Christine Randle

By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout. That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers. These tracks are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me. Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May. You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products. For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors. Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch. I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.” It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day. This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments. They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids. The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west. There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.

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The Complementary Roles of PLM and PIM

- by Ulf Köster

Oracle Product Value Chain Solutions (aka Enterprise PLM Solutions) are a comprehensive set of product management solutions that work together to provide Oracle customers with a broad array of capabilities to manage all aspects of product life: innovation, design, launch, and supply chain / commercialization processes beyond the capabilities and boundaries of traditional engineering-focused Product Lifecycle Management applications. They support companies with an integrated managed view across the product value chain: From Lab to Launch, From Farm to Fork, From Concept to Product to Customer, From Product Innovation to Product Design and Product Commercialization. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) represents a broad suite of software solutions to improve product-oriented business processes and data. PLM success stories prove that PLM helps companies improve time to market, increase product-related revenue, reduce product costs, reduce internal costs and improve product quality. As a maturing suite of enterprise solutions, PLM is still evolving to realize the promise it can provide across all facets of a business and all phases of the product lifecycle. The vision for PLM includes everything from gathering early requirements for a product through multiple stages of the product lifecycle from product design, through commercialization and eventual product retirement or replacement. In discrete or process industries, PLM is typically more focused on Product Definition as items with respect to the technical view of a material or part, including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data. With Agile PLM, this is specifically related to capabilities addressing Product Collaboration, Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management and Engineering Collaboration. PLM today is mainly addressing key requirements in the early product lifecycle, in engineering changes or in the “innovation cycle”, and primarily adds value related to product design, development, launch and engineering change process. In short, PLM is the master for Product Definition, wherever manufacturing takes place. Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has evolved in parallel to PLM. Product Information Management (PIM) can extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary tools and capabilities. More relevant in the area of Product Commercialization, the vision for PIM is to manage product information throughout an enterprise and supply chain to improve product-related knowledge management, information sharing and synchronization from multiple data sources. PIM success stories have shown the ability to provide multiple benefits, with particular emphasis on reducing information complexity and information management costs. Product Information in PIM is typically treated as the commercial view of a material or part, including sales and marketing information and categorization. PIM collects information from multiple manufacturing sites and multiple suppliers into its repository, but also provides integration tools to push the information back out to the other systems, serving as an active central repository with the aim to provide a holistic view on any product sold by a company (hence the name “Product Hub”). In short, PIM is the master of commercial Product Information. So PIM is quickly becoming mandatory because of its value in optimizing multichannel selling processes and relationships with customers, as you can see from the following table: Viewpoint PLM Current State PIM Key Benefits PIM adds to PLM Product Lifecycle Primarily R&D Front end Innovation Cycle Change process Primarily commercial / transactional state of lifecycle Provides a seamless information flow from design and manufacturing through the ultimate selling and servicing of products Data Primarily focused on “item” vs. “product” data Product structures Specifications Technical information Repository for all product information. Reaches out to entire enterprise and its various silos of product information and descriptions Provides a “trusted source” of accurate product information to the internal organization and trading partners Data Lifecycle Repository for all design iterations Historical information Released, current information, with version management and time stamping Provides a single location to track and audit historical product information Communication PLM release finished product to ERP PLM is the master for Product Definition Captures information from disparate sources, including in-house data stores Recognizes the reality of today’s data “mess” across information silos Provides the ability to package product information to its audience in the desired, relevant format to meet their exacting business requirements Departmental R&D Manufacturing Quality Compliance Procurement Strategic Marketing Focus on Marketing and Sales Gathering information from other Departments, multiple sites, multiple suppliers A singular enterprise solution that leverages existing information silos and data stores Supply Chain Multi-site internal collaboration Supplier collaboration Customer collaboration Works with customers, exchanges / data pools, and trading partners to provide relevant product information packaged the way the customer desires Provides ability to provide trading partners and internal customers with information in a manner they desire, continuously Tools Data Management Collaboration Innovation Management Cleansing Synchronization Hub functions Consistent, clean and complete commercial product information The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions can be easily added as they share some of the same goals, while coming from two different perspectives: the definition of the product and the commercialization of the product. Both can serve as a form of product “system of record”, but take different approaches to delivering value. Oracle Product Value Chain solutions offer rich new strategies for executives to collectively leverage Agile PLM, Product Data Hub, together with Enterprise Data Quality for Products, and other industry leading Oracle applications to achieve further incremental value, like Oracle Innovation Management. This is unique on the market today.

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World Record Oracle Business Intelligence Benchmark on SPARC T4-4

- by Brian

Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server configured with four SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors delivered the first and best performance of 25,000 concurrent users on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) 11g benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 10. A SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g achieved 25,000 concurrent users with an average response time of 0.36 seconds with Oracle BI server cache set to ON. The benchmark data clearly shows that the underlying hardware, SPARC T4 server, and the Oracle BI EE 11g (11.1.1.6.0 64-bit) platform scales within a single system supporting 25,000 concurrent users while executing 415 transactions/sec. The benchmark demonstrated the scalability of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g 11.1.1.6.0, which was deployed in a vertical scale-out fashion on a single SPARC T4-4 server. Oracle Internet Directory configured on SPARC T4 server provided authentication for the 25,000 Oracle BI EE users with sub-second response time. A SPARC T4-4 with internal Solid State Drive (SSD) using the ZFS file system showed significant I/O performance improvement over traditional disk for the Web Catalog activity. In addition, ZFS helped get past the UFS limitation of 32767 sub-directories in a Web Catalog directory. The multi-threaded 64-bit Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g and SPARC T4-4 server proved to be a successful combination by providing sub-second response times for the end user transactions, consuming only half of the available CPU resources at 25,000 concurrent users, leaving plenty of head room for increased load. The Oracle Business Intelligence on SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate that comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure with a unified business model yields best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance. Oracle BI EE 11g is a newer version of Business Intelligence Suite with richer and superior functionality. Results produced with Oracle BI EE 11g benchmark are not comparable to results with Oracle BI EE 10g benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g is a more difficult benchmark to run, exercising more features of Oracle BI. Performance Landscape Results for the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g Benchmark System Number of Users Response Time (sec) 1 x SPARC T4-4 (4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz) 25,000 0.36 Results for the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 10g Benchmark System Number of Users 2 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 50,000 1 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 28,000 Configuration Summary Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4-4 processors, 3.0 GHz 128 GB memory 4 x 300 GB internal SSD Storage Configuration: "> Sun ZFS Storage 7120 16 x 146 GB disks Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Oracle Solaris Studio 12.1 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (11.1.1.6.0) Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.5 Oracle Internet Directory 11.1.1.6.0 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Benchmark Description Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) delivers a robust set of reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality with a rich end-user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, and more. The Oracle BI EE benchmark test used five different business user roles - Marketing Executive, Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Sales Vice-President, and Service Manager. These roles included a maximum of 5 different pre-built dashboards. Each dashboard page had an average of 5 reports in the form of a mix of charts, tables and pivot tables, returning anywhere from 50 rows to approximately 500 rows of aggregated data. The test scenario also included drill-down into multiple levels from a table or chart within a dashboard. The benchmark test scenario uses a typical business user sequence of dashboard navigation, report viewing, and drill down. For example, a Service Manager logs into the system and navigates to his own set of dashboards using Service Manager. The BI user selects the Service Effectiveness dashboard, which shows him four distinct reports, Service Request Trend, First Time Fix Rate, Activity Problem Areas, and Cost Per Completed Service Call spanning 2002 to 2005. The user then proceeds to view the Customer Satisfaction dashboard, which also contains a set of 4 related reports, drills down on some of the reports to see the detail data. The BI user continues to view more dashboards – Customer Satisfaction and Service Request Overview, for example. After navigating through those dashboards, the user logs out of the application. The benchmark test is executed against a full production version of the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Applications with a fully populated underlying database schema. The business processes in the test scenario closely represent a real world customer scenario. See Also SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Business Intelligence oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN WebLogic Suite oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 30 September 2012.

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Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

- by Michael Hylton

Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group. I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara. Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time: 1) The Dynamic Customer Journey: Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations. Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this. 2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance. Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation. As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides. 3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond. Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not. It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond. In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires. All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks. There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com. A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang. As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

- by Maria Sandu

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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PRUEBAS DE ESPECIALIZACION 2013/2014

- by agallego

Consigue tu Certificado de Especialista Oracle de forma GRATUITA , 27 y 28 de Noviembre de 2013 Ahora puedes realizar los exámenes de implementación de las especializaciones de Oracle y convertirte en especialista. Podrás realizar cualquiera de los exámenes de implementación de la siguiente lista: Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Sales Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-456) Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Incentive Compensation Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-472) Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-510) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-465) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-480) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Human Resources Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-584) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Talent Management Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-585) Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service 2013 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-474) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Payable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-507) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Receivable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-506) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-508) Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration 11g Essentials (1Z0-469) Oracle Documaker Standard Edition 12 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-570) Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials (1Z0-533) Oracle Hyperion Financial Management 11 Essentials (1Z0-532) Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-591) Oracle Essbase 11 Essentials (1Z0-531) Oracle GoldenGate 10 Essentials (1Z0-539) Oracle GoldenGate 11g Certified Implementation Exam Essentials Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for CRM Essentials (1Z0-524) Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for ERP Essentials (1Z0-525) Oracle Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 2.3 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-461) Oracle SOA Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-478) Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-451) Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-560) Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-599) Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-523) Oracle WebCenter Content 11g Essentials (1Z0-542) Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g Essentials (1Z0-541) Oracle Application Development Framework Essentials (1Z1-554) Oracle Identity Governance Suite 11g Essentials(1z0-459) Oracle Access Management Suite Plus 11g Essentials Exam(1z0-479) M2M Platform Certified Architecture Essentials (1Z0-467) Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-462) Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Essentials(1Z0-468) Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials (1Z0-536) Exadata Database Machine Models X3-2 and X3-8 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-485) Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Exadata X3 Administration(1Z0-027) Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-569) Oracle Linux System Administration (1Z0-403) Oracle Linux Fundamentals (1Z0-402) Oracle Linux 6 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-460) Oracle VM 3 for x86 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-590) Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Essentials (1Z0-530 ) Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Essentials (1Z0-457) SPARC T4-Based Server Installation Essentials (1Z0-597) 1Z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration 1Z0-822 Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced System Administration Oracle Solaris 11 Installation and Configuration Essentials (1Z0-580) StorageTek Tape Libraries Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-546) Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Certified Implementation Specialist The Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8 Essentials (1Z0-567) The Primavera Portfolio Management Essentials (1Z0-544) Primavera Contract Management 14 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-582) Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-562) Oracle Policy Automation 10 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-534) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-566) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-583) Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting 13.3 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-463) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Merchandising System 13.2 Foundation Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-453) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Point-of-Service Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-572) Oracle Retail Price Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-454) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-455) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FlexCube Universal Banking 11 Basic Implementation Essentials (1Z0-561) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FLEXCUBE Direct Banking 6 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-594) Puedes consultar la información acerca de los examenes en cada uno de los enlaces. Para prepararte los examenes sigue la Guia de estudio que encontrarás en la página de cada examen. Requisitos: ser Partner Gold, Platinum o Diamond de Oracle y tener un usuario de Oracle Pearson Vue. ¿Cuándo?: 27 y 28 de noviembre a las (9:00, 12:00, 16:00) ¿Dónde?: Core Networks, C.E.Parque Norte, Edificio Olmo, Planta 1 Serrano Galvache 56 | 28033, Madrid Para inscribirte: Create una cuenta en Pearson Vue (www.pearsonvue.com/oracle). Para Registrarte aquí. Para más información sobre el programa de especializaciones, haz clic aquí. No pierdas esta oportunidad e inscríbete hoy. Para cualquier duda contactar con [email protected]. Ana María Gallego Partner Enablement Manager Spain and Portugal

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Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

- by Kellsey Ruppel

As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared. Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it. Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations. Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created. Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose. Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience. I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose. The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them. Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging. Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities. An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter). Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage. I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service. From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets. Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate. As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors. This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy. This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies. These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick.

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Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

- by aspiringgeek

Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014. Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc. The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps. In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data. The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically. The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes. As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics. Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible. The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators. As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing. I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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What Keeps You from Changing Your Public IP Address and Wreaking Havoc on the Internet?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

What exactly is preventing you (or anyone else) from changing their IP address and causing all sorts of headaches for ISPs and other Internet users? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Whitemage is curious about what’s preventing him from wantonly changing his IP address and causing trouble: An interesting question was asked of me and I did not know what to answer. So I’ll ask here. Let’s say I subscribed to an ISP and I’m using cable internet access. The ISP gives me a public IP address of 60.61.62.63. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75, and messing with another consumer’s internet access? For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this other IP address is also owned by the same ISP. Also, let’s assume that it’s possible for me to go into the cable modem settings and manually change the IP address. Under a business contract where you are allocated static addresses, you are also assigned a default gateway, a network address and a broadcast address. So that’s 3 addresses the ISP “loses” to you. That seems very wasteful for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which the majority of customers are. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Two things to investigate here, why can’t we just go around changing our addresses, and is the assignment process as wasteful as it seems? The Answer SuperUser contributor Moses offers some insight: Cable modems aren’t like your home router (ie. they don’t have a web interface with simple point-and-click buttons that any kid can “hack” into). Cable modems are “looked up” and located by their MAC address by the ISP, and are typically accessed by technicians using proprietary software that only they have access to, that only runs on their servers, and therefore can’t really be stolen. Cable modems also authenticate and cross-check settings with the ISPs servers. The server has to tell the modem whether it’s settings (and location on the cable network) are valid, and simply sets it to what the ISP has it set it for (bandwidth, DHCP allocations, etc). For instance, when you tell your ISP “I would like a static IP, please.”, they allocate one to the modem through their servers, and the modem allows you to use that IP. Same with bandwidth changes, for instance. To do what you are suggesting, you would likely have to break into the servers at the ISP and change what it has set up for your modem. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Every ISP is different, both in practice and how close they are with the larger network that is providing service to them. Depending on those factors, they could be using a combination of ACL and static ARP. It also depends on the technology in the cable network itself. The ISP I worked for used some form of ACL, but that knowledge was a little beyond my paygrade. I only got to work with the technician’s interface and do routine maintenance and service changes. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75 and mess with another consumer’s internet access? Given the above, what keeps you from changing your IP to one that your ISP hasn’t specifically given to you is a server that is instructing your modem what it can and can’t do. Even if you somehow broke into the modem, if 60.61.62.75 is already allocated to another customer, then the server will simply tell your modem that it can’t have it. David Schwartz offers some additional insight with a link to a white paper for the really curious: Most modern ISPs (last 13 years or so) will not accept traffic from a customer connection with a source IP address they would not route to that customer were it the destination IP address. This is called “reverse path forwarding”. See BCP 38. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Let's Get Social and Interactive

- by Christie Flanagan

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} On this blog, we often write about getting social and interactive. Usually, we’re talking about how to create a social business or how to make the customer experience more social and interactive. Today’s topic is about getting social and interactive as well. But this time we’re talking about getting social and interactive the old fashioned way, face-to-face at Oracle OpenWorld with fellow Oracle WebCenter customers, partners and experts and the broader Oracle community. Here are some great ways to get social at OpenWorld outside of the exhibition halls and meeting rooms: Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception - Sponsored by FujitsuSunday, September 30, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.Yerba Buena Gardens & Howard Street Tent You’ll definitely want to attend the Opening Ceremonies for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on Sunday, September 30. Centered in Yerba Buena Gardens (YBG) and shimmying out to other venues, the Opening Ceremonies are not to be missed. Join other attendees for great food and drink, energizing music, networking opportunities, and more. While you’re at YBG (home of ORACLE TEAM USA’s America’s Cup Pavilion), be sure to meet the sailors who will be defending the 34th America’s Cup in 2013. Get a good look at the 161-year old Trophy itself—the oldest trophy still being contested in international sport. And at the AC72 boat display, view a model of the largest wingsail ever built. Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation ReceptionTuesday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.—9:30 p.m.The Palace Hotel, Rallston BallroomThose Oracle WebCenter customers who’ve RSVP’d to attend the Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception shouldn’t miss this private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Sponsored by Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream, this evening will provide plenty of time to interact with other WebCenter customers, partners and employees over hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. Oracle Appreciation Event – Sponsored by CSC, Fujitsu and IntelWednesday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.—1:00 a.m.Treasure Island, San Francisco On Wednesday night October 3, Treasure Island will be engineered to rock as the Oracle Appreciation Event gets revved up and attendees get rolling. As always at the Oracle Appreciation Event, there will be unlimited refreshments, fun and games, the most awesome views of San Francisco from just about anywhere, and top notch entertainment. Past performers read like a veritable who’s who of the rock and roll elite. Join us—it's our way of saying thanks to you for supporting Oracle and our flagship conference. Complimentary shuttle service to and from Treasure Island will be provided, so all you have to worry about is having a rocking night of your own. Oracle OpenWorld Music FestivalSeptember 30-October 4, Check schedule for venues and times.Oracle presents the first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today’s breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world including Macy Gray, Joss Stone, Jimmy Cliff and The Hives. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. With limited space at some venues, these concerts are first-come, first-served. So mark your calendars and get ready for the music to begin. See you there!I hope this give you an idea of the many opportunities to socialize and interact with the Oracle community at OpenWorld, and if you’re a music lover like me, you’re in for a special treat as we debut our first annual Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival. Check out the links below for more information on these events and the many featured performers: Reflections from the Young Prisms A Brief Soul Session with Joss Stone Mixing It Up with Blues Mix Red Meat’s Music is Rare and Well Done The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling Gets Philosophical Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Oracle Appreciation Event There’s Magic in the Air, There’ll Be Music Everywhere Looking forward to seeing you at OpenWorld!

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?My Oracle Support???????????????

- by user763198

Normal 0 7.8 ? 0 2 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE Normal 0 7.8 ? 0 2 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:????; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:105%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:EN-US;} l ????????? ??????Help ??????? Table of Contents? ????Certification? ??,????????: My Oracle Support Help - Certifications (Doc ID 870956.5) l ????????? ?????????????????????????,???My Oracle Support Help - Certifications (Doc ID 870956.5)????????????????????,??? Global Customer Support ????? l ??????????? ????????????: http://www.oracle.com/support/contact.html l ???????????? ????????????: https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:home:0:::::&tz=8:00 ????????????????,???? “Contact Us” ??? l ???????,??? Export ??? ???????: 1. ???????,????,????Copy Selected Row,??Actions?????Copy Selected Rows? 2. ??????spreadsheet,??????? email ???? ?????????????table ??,????table ??,????Printable View????????????????,?????????????? ????tables????Export??, ??????export???????CSV???? ??:???Printable View ?Export?????????,??????????????? l ?????????? ?Oracle Education ??????????: http://education.oracle.com ????????????? ???????????,???Oracle Education ??(????????????)? l ????? License codes/Keys? http://www.oracle.com/us/support/licensecodes/index.html ?????????License Codes ?????????????(?????),????????????????????Oracle license code ?????????,????Customer Support Identifier (CSI)? l ???Software Delivery Cloud ????????? ???Software Delivery Cloud ???????? (Doc ID 1070969.1) ??? http://edelivery.oracle.com/ ,Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. ??“Sign In/Register” button. ??Terms & Restrictions ????Continue ????????,????Go ????????Continue ????????? l ??????Oracle.com ???? 1, ? www.oracle.com 2, ???????“Help” 3, ?????,???“Oracle.com login FAQ” 4, ???????????? 5, Oracle.com ???????????? l ????CRM Ondemand ????? ?CRMOD ??,????????: (i) CRMOD ??????: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/crmondemand/support/customer-care-support-337680.html (ii) CRMOD ?????????,?????????????????: https://ebusiness.siebel.com/odcustomercare/contact/contact_cc.asp l ???? Oracle Software Delivery Cloud ??? ????Oracle Software Delivery Cloud – ??Oracle ??????,???/????????email ???????? ???????: 1. ? www.oracle.com ?????Single Sign-On (SSO) ?? 2. ?????"Account" 3. ????,?? "Please verify account(?????)" ,????????????email ID 4. ????????,???????? l ???My Oracle Support??????Oracle Database Patchset ? 1. ?????? 2. ??Product ?Product Family: Oracle database. 3. ????:? Oracle 10.2.0.4. 4. ????:?Microsoft x64 (64-bit). 5. ??????: Patchset/Minipack. 6. ?? Go. l ?????????????FTP ??? ???? CD/DVD ? FTP ??: ???My Oracle Support ( https://support.oracle.com ) ???????Contact Us?? ???????????? CD/DVD ? FTP ???????????? ????????,????????,?????????????,????????????

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Migration from Exchange to BPOS - Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit Link

- by Harish Pavithran

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless toolkit that finds computers on a network and performs a detailed inventory of the computers using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and the Remote Registry Service. The data and analysis provided by this toolkit can significantly simplify the planning process for migrating to Windows® 7, Windows Vista®, Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Server® 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, Microsoft Application Virtualization, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Forefront® Client Security and Network Access Protection. Assessments for Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Vista include device driver availability as well as recommendations for hardware upgrades. If you are interested in server virtualization planning, MAP provides the ability to gather performance metrics from computers you are considering for virtualization and a feature to model a library of potential host hardware and storage configurations. This information can be used to quickly perform "what-if" analysis using Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 as virtualization platforms. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=67240b76-3148-4e49-943d-4d9ea7f77730

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Calculating estimated data loss with Always on

- by blakmk

Ever wondered how calculate estimated data loss (time) for always on. The metric in the always on dashboard shows the metric quite nicely but there does seem to be a lack of documentation about where the metrics ---come from. Heres a script that calculates the data loss ( lag ) so you can set up alerts based on your DR SLA's: WITH DR_CTE ( replica_server_name, database_name, last_commit_time) AS ( select ar.replica_server_name, database_name, rs.last_commit_time from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states rs inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id where replica_server_name != @@servername ) select ar.replica_server_name, dcs.database_name, rs.last_commit_time, DR_CTE.last_commit_time 'DR_commit_time', datediff(ss, DR_CTE.last_commit_time, rs.last_commit_time) 'lag_in_seconds' from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states rs inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id inner join DR_CTE on DR_CTE.database_name = dcs.database_name where ar.replica_server_name = @@servername order by lag_in_seconds desc

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Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

- by Tarun Arora

Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples. After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped. Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run. Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test. Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through. As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete. Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’. Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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